Friday, September 14, 2012

To celebrate the publication of THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2012, which I'm wildly proud to have guest-edited, I wrote a little essay for Publishers' Weekly. It's just out today, but since I know lots of people don't see that journal, I thought I'd post the piece here. "Best of" collections are always lend themselves to a bit of contention, and many people aren't aware of the process of making such a thing.
So here goes, for the curious:

When
David Lehman invited me to take on the project of guest editing the Best
American Poetry 2012 – the twenty-fifth edition of the annual anthology that
appears in September of each year, bringing forth jubilation and curses among
poets throughout the land, I was intrigued. I spent some time, just now,
choosing that word intrigued.Delighted
– though I was, as well as honored and pleased – seems to lack complexity.
What I want here is a word that combines pleasure with a degree of challenge, a
nuanced acknowledgement that one doesn’t really take on such a task lightly,
without thinking about just what you’re getting yourself into.

Poets,
by nature, favor anarchy, or at least resist consensus. When anything smacks of
the official or the imprimatur, you will find them muttering in the lobby,
grumbling in the vestibule, or cursing under their breaths outside the door.
Poetry thrives on the unofficial, the unnoticed, the neglected, the
unauthorized. Ask Emily Dickinson.

But
on the other hand, the solitary nature of our art makes us long for company,
and every poet wants to be heard. Even as private a poet as Dickinson wanted to
be read, which is why the terms fame
and publication occur again and again
in her work; she was summoning her audience into being, even if it took some
time for them to arrive.

This
contradiction – the fact that we poets tend to be poor team-players and that we
very much want to be loved – is what causes us to react so strongly to the Best
American Poetry. We are fascinated by it, and love to criticize it. It is
widely read indeed; a number of younger poets who are now well established, a
National Book Award winner among them, have told me that one of these
anthologies was the first book of poems they ever owned. And it is widely bashed
as boring, dominated by insiders, or beside the point.

But
I was also aware that here was a chance to point readers toward 75 wonderful
poems (each volume includes exactly the same number). I happen to think this is
a particularly vital moment in American poetry, and that poems of great formal
variety and genuine ambition are being published now in many venues, from
big-ticket journals to small enterprises that open up like mushrooms after rain
and often close just as quickly.

I
mean ambition in the best sense of
the term – that the best of our poems are grappling with the hardest things to
say: what it’s like to be awake, to be a thinking and feeling person in these
vexed, dizzying hours. Maybe it feels no more difficult to be human than it did
in, say, 1650, but I remain deeply convinced of the urgency of speaking in our
times, of naming where we are. That was why I said yes to David’s offer; I
wanted a chance to demonstrate the liveliness, emotional vigor, intelligence
and wit our art offers just now, an array of gifts to the culture that all too
often go unopened.

What
I hadn’t imagined was the sheer tonnage of verse that would almost immediately
descend upon my post office box, and continue to do so from January to
December. In truth, no one can read every poem published in America in a given
year, mainly because it would be a superhuman achievement to find them all. But Lehman has assembled
a remarkably efficient and thorough means of getting work at hand to his guest
editor. I began very early on to put some poems in a “probably maybe yes” pile,
and David read these with enthusiasm, venturing an opinion now and then before
sending me another envelope, box, sack, sled or howdah full of poems. Sometime
I’d read a little at a time, grabbing a few poems between phone calls or before
making dinner. Some days I’d set aside long, indulgent bouts of wandering in
journals for hours. Plane trips and train journeys were especially good, though
it meant I was always traveling with an extra bag, usually a cloth tote stuffed
to the brim with poems. Read, winnow, recycle, hold back the best, repeat.

Here
is what most surprised me: I read more poems than any reasonable human being
would ever read in a year’s time, and it was fun. Joyous, bracing, the kind of
pleasure that gives you energy rather than robbing you of it. Sometimes I’d
read for a couple of hours and think, oh why not, an hour more. I’d think I’d
had it, then notice the cover of a journal I hadn’t seen before, and before you
know I was deeply immersed again.

Of
course there were times I looked at teetering piles of photocopied papers and
stacks of magazines, or remembered the five new online journals I’d just heard
about, and felt overwhelmed, mildly resentful, and a little ill. But the truth
is, whenever I started to read, these feelings passed, often remarkably
quickly.

Because,
of course, contemporary American poetry is actually terrifically interesting –
especially if you approach each poem as if this one might be masterful. This could be a miraculous marriage of sense
and music from a poet you’ve never heard of before.Or it might be someone I’ve been reading for years,
appearing with a poem impossible to forget.

If
these criteria sound exacting, they are. Only 75 poems, out of many thousand,
and that demands that the chosen few be distinctive indeed: gorgeous or
possessed of a perfectly achieved plainness, startling or inevitable,
uncommonly well made, grave, hilarious, wrenching, sly, urgent, arising from a
profound need to speak.

This
returns me to the theme of ambition; each of the poems I chose, out of my
dauntingly large “maybe probably yes” pile, is trying fiercely hard to get at
something crucial, trying to find form and language for what might otherwise go
unnamed.

I
know I missed things; no one can read that much without some good stuff
slipping through the cracks, and I’m sure there were valuable poems that never
crossed my threshold, sad to say. The nature of an anthology like this is that
decisions have to be made quickly, within the bounds of the year; there isn’t
time to spend months debating the value of one poem over another. What I was
making, finally, is a snapshot of our moment, and a testament to the kinds of
poems that move me and matter to me.

I’m
sure that my edition of the BAP will raise some hackles, as they all do – but I
am also utterly certain that this is a readable, energetic, engaging sampling
of an art I love. Like most committed readers of poetry, I’m always wanting to
share poems I like, pass them on to anyone who’ll listen. That’s what this book
is. Is it “the best of” anything? Who cares, really? To my mind these are 75
reasons to be glad to be alive now, when such art is being made.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Tonight I saw Ira Sachs' new movie, Keep the Lights On, here in Chelsea. What a complicated, intense couple of hours! Because I have any number of friends who are memoirists or writers of personal nonfiction, I'm used to reading about people I know. Usually that's an experience of intimacy; one comes closer to the inner life of friends than one might be likely to in conversation. Not because so much is revealed, necessarily; it's HOW that revealing takes place -- not content so much as the way content is thought about, reflected upon, understood. Great first person writing is the clearest and best rendering of what it's like to be that person that the writer can create. So when I read, say, Nick Flynn or Terry Tempest Williams or my friend Deborah Lott, whose marvelous new memoir I have just read in manuscript, I have the experience of coming closer, feeling, as it were, the contours of the inner life. It's amazing. I just read an excerpt from Salman Rushdie's new memoir in THE NEW YORKER, and though it's in the third person it has curiously just the same effect; we enter the interiority of the character.

Film's a different beast altogether, and since I don't know a lot of filmmakers, I don't think until this evening I've ever had the experience of seeing a movie about people I know, or about characters based on those people. I felt I was standing outside of someone else's house, looking not directly into their rooms but into a complicated mirror which possessed its own agency, and reflected the inhabitants in its own fashion -- so that they were artfully rendered, and unfamilar, and echoed the lives of people I know.

I want to talk about just one odd little aspect of this. The film begins with two men meeting over a phone sex line (it's 1998, so internet hook-ups haven't happened yet). There's a sweetness and lightness of touch during its first twenty or so minutes, as the guys become closer and more open to one another. I was caught up in the storyline, and suddenly there was one of the characters, in bed, reading my book ATLANTIS.

It didn't matter that I knew it was coming; Ira had asked my permission to use the book in his screenplay; because it's a book of poems largely concerned with the epidemic, it's a starting point for the two to have a conversation about HIV. Maybe I should have been prepared, but I felt two unexpected, contradictory things: first, I was tickled -- my book was in a movie! There was just something childishly delightful about the sense of validation. And it was a book from 1995, and there it was, alive, being read and discussed by two naked men onscreen. I loved it.

And I immediately understood that I had been in the suspension-of-disbelief zone, which is something that I truly love about the movies. The lights go down, the noisy previews end, the opening credits and music start to focus your attention, and suddenly you're allowed -- invited -- to relinquish your will, and allow your perceptions to be guided. We stop making decisions, when we agree to participate in a film. It doesn't matter to me one bit whether I am looking at, say, an opal-eyed dragon, or two men meeting and falling in love in New York City. Both are equally experiences of leaving the daily world, entering something other.

But there was my book, and there went the fourth wall. And then from that moment on I was required to participate in the film in a different way -- which could be a good thing, and is most certainly an uncomfortable one.